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c0lo writes "The Canadian town of Mission, BC has a bylaw that allows the town's Public Safety Inspection Team to search people's homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day. There have allegedly been reports floating in IRC of two different cases of police showing up at a Bitcoin miner's residence with a search warrant. Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation. DEA Agent Anthony Marotta said high electricity usage does not always mean the residence is an indoor pot farm and has surprised federal agents. 'We thought it was a major grow operation ... but this guy had some kind of business involving computers. I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home.'"

I know somebody that has a rig that does 1700 million hashes per second and uses 1000 watts (using 4 ATI 6970's). If you plug it into here, you'll find he nets an average of $1450.89 per month considering electricity at $0.15 per kwh

I decided against doing it myself because the miner growth rate is so high right now. It's around 5% a day, which means if it continues at the same rate, in 3 months it'll be more like $170 per month for his rig.

Right now mining is profitable since the value of bitcoins has recently gapped up from a buck to $7. But as more people mine, the algorithm must solve harder mining problems so in the longer term it is a self-regulating process. I have contemplated giving it a shot. To make a profit you have to build the machines as cheaply as possible and also live in an area with very cheap electricity.

As a side note, the whole affair is a big waste of resources, just like gold mining. However, it's this intrinsic cost to create the currency that makes it sound money - as opposed to fiat money, which can be made at no cost to the person authorized to print it.

But he wasn't raided. It just gave a probable cause for a search. Generally high correlation with criminal activity does seem like a justified probable cause. It's not like he got jailed or, worse, convicted on something. In fact, the "probable" in "probable cause" can be interpreted to mean correlation. If you set the bar any higher, you would actually be demanding to show actual cause (rather than probable cause). How's that for a rant derived from "correlation does not imply causation?"

While I can see your annoyance at the recent spade of bitcoin articles, this is interesting outside of bitcoin. What if you had a beowulf clusters or stacks of machines running folding or other, arguably, more useful applications. High energy usage or a sudden spike in power consumption shouldn't be probable cause in and of itself.

I dread to think what would happen if a sudden and consistent spike in energy usage were probable cause where I live. I went two years without a television, with my main drains on electricity being my laptop, speakers, and my fridge. Once I picked up an older 50" plasma monitor and started playing my PS3 I noticed a considerable increase in cost/use. Should I have my door kicked in because I might be growing weed, even though the reality is much more innocuous (smoking weed and playing video games)?

Pragmatically, this whole ordeal should be a non issue. If people want to grow pot in their homes, let them. Big fuckin' deal!

The only reason pot is so demonized is because it's easy to identify and prosecute. It is, by far, the least damaging "drug" in the western world. I'm way more worried about getting a heart attack from too much Advil, unsurprisingly due to the stress caused by all these conservative idiots trying to tell people how to live their lives. The pothead next door, while annoying with his brain-damanged music tastes and lack of valuable employment, is far less harmful to my existence than the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry that wants me to be sick 24-7 so I can consume their overpriced filth.

I think the Bitcoin thing is a very short-lived fad. The more people get in on it, the less valuable it becomes. The guy who's getting raided this week, well next week would have dropped out anyway once the mining "difficulty" doubles and he's suddenly spending more on hydro and Radeon 5970's than he's getting back in funny money. Big whoop!

"The pothead next door, while annoying with his brain-damanged music tastes and lack of valuable employment"

I now you were just being colorful and hyperbolic, but I feel that I should let you know that, if I am the pothead next door to you, it is statistically probable that I make more money, work harder and am in better shape than you. If people like me were safe to "out" themselves as potsmokers, your stereotypes would crumble.

When alcohol was made legal again in the US it reduced a lot of violent crime. Today pot is involved in a lot of violent crime, smoking dope is by no means a victimless crime. So I can see that legalizing it could solve some problems.

However we still have laws and regulations about alcohol, it's not a "sell and drink all you want" anarchy. So if pot were legalized it would also be highly regulated and monitored (and thus not the libertarian dream it seems at first glance).

Legalization solves the acquisition problem. Personally, I don't smoke, but I have absolutely no problem with someone who smokes recreationally - a lot of my friends do, and that's perfectly OK by me. To me, alcohol is just another recreational drug, and they should all be treated the same. Anyone can choose to allow drugs to dominate and destroy their well-being, and legality has no influence on that behaviour. I'd rather have someone get chilled on pot, than high on violent greed as we're seeing in many big american cities. At least the stoner just chills out in his living room, appreciating music:)

that argument only works if
1: it being illegal actually prevents people just getting high all day
2: throwing them in prison was less harmful/costly to society than accepting that lifestyle.

there are other options of course, you could legalise it but have mandatory rehabilitation classes or something that tries to get them back into the workforce, which would probably have low success rates but be spectacularly more useful than throwing them in jail.

It amazes me that so many people who advocate control of drugs think that the way to achieve this is by criminalizing them..
Since the government , or related industry , is not allowed to sell or manage illegal substances they basically have handed over control to the underground. And.. considering the profits to be made in the current illegal drug trade.. it is certainly NOT in the best interests of the underground trade to have *anything* legalized..it's been implied in the past that some of the stiffest

Amen, brother! Our governments prevent people from dulling the monotony of servient existence, but they don't prevent anyone from eating their way to the ICU for a triple-bypass. I'll take a stoner over a 400lb scooter-riding welfare case, any day.

Yes, maybe it is possible that cigs are "less damaging" than weed, when compared toke for toke. But how many cigs does the average tobacco addict smoke every day, 10? 15? Many smoke much more than that. Pot is strong these days, right? So how much, by weight/mass/joints, do typical potheads smoke every day? A hell of a lot less than 10-15 joints. If it is of high quality, probably less than the weight of one cigarette. Ounce for ounce, yes, MAYBE ganja is worse than tobacco, but aside from rastafarians no one (not counting all the wannabe gangsters who claim to smoke 75 blunts a day) consumes THAT much herbage a day.

Think about it: heavy tobacco smokers light up every 30-60 minutes if they can, while dope aficionados don't get high more than a few times a day, often less, and shouldn't need a fat cigarette worth per person every time, so this is not an apples-apples comparison.

The first four paragraphs are nothing but gushing about bitcoins, no mention of the bust at all. The 5ths finally makes a mention of the power thing and then there's a bit of talk about the alleged bust from the wonderfully reliable source of "IRC". Then more shit about how bitcoin is a cool "P2P" currency then a video about bitcoins.

The fucking thing is a bitcoin promotion and just more of the "Oh look at how awesome and scary it is!" crap. I have serious doubts the event in question ever happened. This is astroturfing.

Any journalist will tell you that you lead with the most important stuff. Each subsequent paragraph is less likely to be read. So if this was about rights and a real event the first paragraph would go more along the lines of:

"What was supposed to be a bust for a pot growing operation went wrong for police when the discovered a house with nothing but a large number of computers working overtime. Police obtained a warrant for the house of $some_guy due to energy company records showing an unusually high amount of usage, often a sign of a marijuana growing location. However no drugs were found, instead just mean computers which were engaged in a process called 'bitcoin mining."

Then maybe a paragraph about bitcoins, then one about drug ops and power usage and so on. That it starts with bitcoins and goes for 5 paragraphs tells you that the article is all about that, not the supposed rights issue.

If that's the case, it's hard to say what their expected ROI will be. I know that in my case, I already had a 5850 in my machine (a very good mining GPU) and thus, with a little bit of luck I've 'mined' 150 coins in a month. At the current exchange rate, those coins would we worth ~$1000 dollars if I cashed out now, and I really only paid for electricity. Depending on the hardware they bought, and when they started (the difficulty has really ramped up in the last couple weeks), they could be sitting on a nice payout, assuming they aren't dumb enough to try dumping them all onto the market at once.

For my part, I'm interested in bitcoins as a viable currency and not just as some bizarre experiment in cryptographic "stock" to dump when I need some extra spending cash, so I expect I'll be holding onto mine until I can get some actual goods with them.

(Also, I hate the term 'mining'. It's really more like 'accounting', but it's probably too late to change anything.)

The article even said he was going to buy 10,000 BTC.. if he would have done that instead (with the current exchange rate) he'd be sitting at $70k

As you can see, mining is a fool's errand. Now.. buying a thousand or so BTC might have seemed like a smart move on my part right about now, wish I did. Bitcoin seems akin to a pyramid scheme. The early adopters get insane amounts, this leads to a huge increase of people 'using' and 'valuing' the currency

RGB LEDs and PWM: any color is craftable. I'm no pot-grower, but I read a long time ago, that red-blue light is the best for increasing growth and yield. This was for a zero-g hydroponic garden, though, so it might not apply to marijuana...

LEDs can be used, however they must emit certain frequencies of light in order to work. Most off the shelf LEDs won't work. IIRC, different stages in the grow cycle respond only certain frequencies; so it responds to one frequency at one stage and then a different frequency in another. There are LED light arrays that only do one frequency requiring you to either move the plants or the lights. There are other products that have LEDs that do all the needed frequencies.

"Rumors floating around IRC" strikes me as somewhere between Fox News and Homeless Guy on Street Corner in terms of credibility. This is exactly the sort of story that someone would make up as a joke, and people would repeat as though it's real.

I assumed it was made up by the Bitcoin guys to get them some more publicity and to make it look like people actually took them seriously.

Considering this is the third or so story about Bitcoin, I'm guessing someone has hired a marketing firm/intern to get these stories out there.That's the only real explanation for how these stories are getting planted around the web.

I honestly don't know of anywhere that allows city statues(bylaws) to trump provincial and federal legislation in Canada(there are a few exceptions for Toronto at the provincial level but that's it). Something isn't right in this story, and I think it's the entire thing. In Canada you need to have reasonable and probable grounds to get a warrant, power usage isn't enough for that. And I can't see some city trying to pull a 'safety inspection' pile of crap, being that any lawyer here will tell them off t

You mean the man traps, electrical code violations caused by, bypassing mains, and cutting through everything in order to run ducting, and in turn causing structural damage? I guess none of those are problems.

It is in fact a "safety inspection". I believe they do need a warrant to get into your home unless you let them in, I don't know if the would need extra evidence to get the warrant or not. here is a link. BCLocalNews [bclocalnews.com]. There is also a $5200 that can be charged to you regardless of if you have a grow op or not, though it is not always charged.
here is another link Globe&Mail [theglobeandmail.com]

So I watched the little video in the article but I don't understand why or how anyone would accept bitcoins as currency. Can anyone explain to me how running an application on your computer to 'make' currency produces anything of value?

It is a scam. The bitcoin production difficulty is exponential, so the first few people who designed the system easily produced a big percentage of the total possible bitcoins (Over 6 million out of the total 21 million scheduled to be produced until the year 2140 are already taken) and now they are doing everything they can to give them value. So, those that "accept" bitcoins as currency are those that have a vested interest in them gaining value.Basically you are using more and more power for the chance to produce a virtual "coin", so you are not producing value, just hurting the environment and if enough stupid people follow your example you will make a few scammers rich.

Production difficulty is not set by anybody, it is just that right now bitcoin is becoming very popular so lost of people are mining. In fact, production of bitcoins is linear, 50 bitcoins each 10 minutes or so on average, but this will go down every 4 years. Nothing exponential about it.

Would you say e-gold was a scam as well? About $600 million was put into e-gold until US government shut it down. Only difference is that b

Thank you. Finally someone else who sees bitcoin for what it really is.

It's an elaborate ponzi scheme designed to generate insane interest at the very beginning (due to people starting getting crazy amounts of BTC).. in turn these people become huge vested in increasing bitcoin's value.. so much so that they becomes fanatics and thus you see stories like this EVERYWHERE these days... more interest is generated by seeing people with 1000s of coins and a $7 exchange rate, leading to a huge influx of more people looking to generate coins, so on and so forthi've said it before and i'll say it again

In the beginning of BTC mining, the FEW people who programmed/used their own personal GPU miners on huge farms (while everyone else was still using CPU) are the only ones who are going to benefit (See more that a couple thousand dollars) from this crap... everything else is just increasing value for these guys.

One issue is that it's illegal in the US to create ones own currency, and I'd wager that it's not just the US that takes that view. Prior to that being made federal law, states and even banks would have their own currency leading to all sorts of confusion. Gift cards get a bit of a free pass in that they're sold and drawn upon legal tender and really just represent a promissory note.

Additionally, because of the way that the system is set up, it looks a bit too much like a Ponzi scheme for my comfort. There'

As I understand it, the process doesn't create anything of inherent value, but it serves to limit supply - same way that gold is difficult to find and mine, is of limited industrial use (and thus limited intrinsic value), and tends to just sit around in vaults once it's been refined, but is still traded and invested in.

The key difference, of course, is that the value of gold has more 'inertia' since there are far, far more people who buy into the notion that gold has value. Bitcoin is pretty volatile because there are far fewer people with a vested interest (in the most literal sense of the term) in its maintained value, and because people find it easier to accept the value of a shiny metal with thousands of years of history than that of a cryptographically signed set of data.

Right which brings us to the key difference between bitcoin and regular government money.

Government money has value because you HAVE to use it to deal with the government and dealing with the governement is basically unavoidable. Many private sellers don't take anything other than government money (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government money) either.

OTOH bitcoins can only be spent at a relatively small number of places most of which take government currency (or bank credits that are effectively equivilent to government currency) as well. So there is far more chance of it becoming worthless in a relatively short time. Especially if governments start trying to crack down on users.

Anyone owed a debt in the US (for instance), must accept US dollars as payment. That's what the notice "this note is legal tender [wikipedia.org] for all debts, public and private" means on dollars. The same is not true for bitcoins--I can freely refuse payment in bitcoins, and the government can do nothing about it. That's a large component of the reason why people like dollars.

It doesn't. It creates a medium of exchange that all players on the network agree upon, and cannot change unilaterally.

You think your US government backed cash has any actual value to it? It has as much (or as little) value as the people who hold it believe it does. Same with bitcoins. It's effectively a cryptographically secure, peer-to-peer financial system. It doesn't contain value, just like no monetary system since the gold standard actually contained value.

It would be something similar to Paypal, just without somebody telling you what you can do or can't (poker) do with your money. Also nobody can freeze your account. Also, free or very low transaction fees.

Also, you can't buy them directly from a company, you have to use trading exchanges to buy and sell them, so the price fluctuates.

If you accept Paypal as something you can use to buy stuff with, you can accept bitcoin, or at least I don't wee why not.

What it produces in an ability that I can send you "something" from my computer to your computer without any central authority, so that you can be sure that I don't have that same thing anymore. And I can't cheat.

If you think about it, it is an interesting problem, because, how can you be sure that I indeed do not have that "something" on my computer. What happens if, after I send you that "something", I restore my computer from backup?

That is what the application produces, and that is what have value for

It all sounds like BS to me. Basically the crypto is just acting as a "proof of work" to limit the currency supply and make forgery difficult, but there's plenty of ways this could be done without the CPU cycles.

Plenty of ways? Name one.

Bitcoin does it in a distributed fashion, without central authority. When I read about how it all works, I thought it was ingenious.

Seems to me as these "probable cause based on power usage" continue and more and more intrusions of this nature should lead to law suits against the police and hopefully disallowing power use as a criteria for determining probable cause. That's a bullshit way of doing law enforcement. I run a server at my home. I'll be damned if I am going to sit idle if I were to have a search warrant against me based on stupid crap like that.

Great, just great. I can see the calls for banning solar energy technology since it allows drug lords to escape detection via electric meters.

Just imagine the rhetoric: "Only pot-farmers use solar energy." "Support HB123 to place export controls on drug energy technology to Mexico!" "Off grid, on drugs!" "Tell the police if your neighbor has gone wireless!"

Great, just great. I can see the calls for banning solar energy technology since it allows drug lords to escape detection via electric meters.

Entirely possible, but in most areas I'd simply go for extensive sun-roofs instead. Solar-electric panels are expensive. The install costs for a sun-roof might be higher, but the panels/windows are a lot cheaper, even if you can only get sun for half the day that way.

Don't laugh at this one. My computer consulting firm, deep in the boonies, was raided as a drug operation. It wasn't but in talking to them we discovered that having solar panels was part of the profiling done on us, as it indicates "pot growing". Which of course is stupid. We do run on solar, but it's way not enough to grow pot in any amount worth it. That's what they make the rest of the boonies for -- outdoors.
FWIW, the profiling was:
Has domestic disputes (I prevented a suicide and they knew that)
People come and go (employees)
People at all hours (we called it flex time)
Those people look rich and happy (it was a great place to work, and high pay)
Owner rarely leaves (no need, my business is on the same campus as my house)
Owner is rich (see above)
Just because the DEA is stupid, doesn't mean it doesn't cost a lot in court fees to make them go away, and the damage they do they never pay for. And due to all those rarely enforced laws on the books, they'll by golly find SOMETHING to bust you for once they've done their "dynamic entry" - count on it.

Three Bitcoin articles on the front page in as many weeks? Sure, this one is a bit sideways, but seriously, the number of people involved with Bitcoin is insignificantly small and should remain that way. Stop hyping this project which is either an ill-fated experiment or a scam.

Someone needs to tell Julian and Ricky that they can cover their pot growing operation with servers. Cops bust in see the servers and never look for the pot. Of couse I doubt that anyone would be competent to set up the serves. Maybe J-Roc.

But seriously, this is the kind of thing that has really killed the world. Here we have a weed that is one of the most perfect and useful plants in existence. Because of fundamentalist faith based lawmaking and general greed it is banned for most purposes. Of course some would say that it damages kids, but how about the legal drugs? The Pfizer commercials tells kids they can only be happy with drugs. Someone like Rush Limbaugh can afford to be a prescription drug addict, and maybe old people in the US with medicare part D, but the average person has to go with the unregulated stuff. It would be nice if kids were not told that drug use is good, and I certainly believe that drug use in general is a losing game, but there we have it. Corporate drugs good, plants are bad.

On top of the insanity of jailing people for growing plants or using plants simply because that plant has not been awarded the special corporate status of tabacco, is just the beginning. So we now have these indoor operation using huge amounts of dirty power that contributes god knows how much to global warming, killing the future even for the kids that aren't addicted to Zoloft. All this waste because growers are forced indoors. Of course in canada part of the problem is the short growing season, but really, it is arguable that the time of the police would be better spent arresting doctors for frivolously doping kids so that they don't annoy their parents.

I hate to tell you, but it never happened. This is an AMD TV commercial (available on Youtube [youtube.com]) saying, basically, run Nvidia and get raided for running a pot growing operation due to excessive power usage.

Oh, and a side note, in the US, the power companies DO regularly report users with sudden spikes of excessive power usage that are indicative of grow ops. This data is volunteered by the power companies, and the police do no

I can't remember exactly where, but someone suggested that this might be a possibility on one of the Bitcoin forums. A day later, someone said in an IRC channel that they had been raided. I'm pretty sure they made it up based on the previous day's speculation. And now a website has picked up the IRC claim, and now Slashdot picks up that website's claim. As far as I can tell there's no backing that this supposed drug bust ever happened, but it's pyramiding into bigger and bigger news based on nothing.

It's an attempted end-run around obtaining a search warrant, which would require more than just higher than average power consumption. The way it works is the municipality sends a bylaw inspector to a home for a "safety inspection" after someone notices that the power consumption at the residence is higher than it should be.

The inspector can't force his way in, but a bit of bullying and a stern "What have you got to hide?" or "I'll come back with a warrant and make your week difficult" is often all that's necessary, especially if the homeowner in question isn't actually doing anything wrong, and isn't used to dealing with stuff like this. The inspector brings along a police escort for "safety and security." Convenient.

The inspector looks around, and if he finds a grow op, well, hey, lookee here, the police just happened to be down the hall! Now they don't need a search warrant because it wasn't "a police search."

If the inspector finds nothing illegal, he (often but not always) presents the homeowner in question with a bill for the inspection, which can range from $5k to $10k.

Good news though: A few days ago, the BC Supreme Court has issued a giant "fark you" to the practice:

I think it's high time we think about extending the 2nd amendment (Right to bear arms), to include technology.

I know they're not busting in to raid a Bitcoin factory, but that doesn't mean they wont in the future.

I'm a coder, and occasionally I write ciphers. Lately I wrote a block cipher system that takes any hash algo, data stream, and a pass-phrase, and produces encrypted output via a type of Cipher Block Chaining on hash-length sized blocks (MD5=160bit, SHA1=256bit, SHA512=512bit encryption, and beyond; Bonus, any new hash comes out, implement it and bingo, stronger encryption).

I came very close to being in violation of federal law when I posted my program on my blog. Fortunately a friend told me that my program was considered extremely dangerous to the government, and that if anyone outside of the US downloaded it, I could be heavily fined and/or jailed. I immediately removed the code, and checked the server logs; Fortunately only my friend had downloaded it.

I didn't know that all strong encryption ciphers have to be registered with the US government [doc.gov] (like firearms!? -- Strength at or above 64bit symmetric or 768 asymmetric, or 128 for elliptic curve), and that export of software that can perform encryption must be approved by the government before you put it online, or else it could be considered trafficking illegal controlled software.

I've been tinkering with ciphers since I was 10 -- I don't think anyone outside the US got a hold of my tinker-code, but who knows? We swapped code at HAL-PC SIG's all the time...

With today's government's lack of respect for our freedoms and esp. digital privacy, I think it's time we added the right to bear technology & math, esp. cryptography to the Bill of Rights.

Hey, If I can be prosecuted for distributing my ciphers under the "munitions export restrictions" laws, then does that mean I already can assert my 2nd amendment privileges to USE MY PC TO TWIDDLE BITS? Does freedom of speech (1st amendment) not give me the right to post some byte-code hex to my blog? (Looks like it's illegal to sell your Beowulf Cluster on Ebay too. [doc.gov])

I saw some of the comments saying that the article reads like an advertisement for bitcoin, so I took a look. Holy crap! They even embedded a promotional video for bitcoin in the article. The bitcoin guys are really, really trying to make millions off this, and they're obviously pushing these pseudo-news-articles to drum up fame and fortune. And, just to be clear, the claim that the police raided a home was based on a rumor seen on an IRC chat ("Blogger Mike Esspe captured an IRC chat that supports the rumor floating around that at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested."). Uh huh. That's news now. And despite the claim that "at least one bitcoin miner has been arrested", the IRC chat actually says the police showed up, looked around, and left. Apparently, "has been arrested" has a totally new meaning in the pseudo-news-article world of bitcoin.

To be fair, the people in Ohio are suspected first, and THEN their electricity records are being pulled to confirm suspicions.
Whereas in Canada, it looks like any random citizen's electricity usage can be monitored by the government.

In the UK, we had an incident some years ago in which an armed assault team raided a guina-pig shed. The heatlamps that were installed to keep the guina pigs warm looked a lot like a pot-growing shed on the helecopter thermal camera, and policy in cases of suspected drug production is to send in the big guns to bash the door down and get everyone cuffed as quickly as possible in order to deny suspects of any chance to destroy evidence.

This being the UK, it ended with the family not just getting compensatio

You realize this was in Canada, right? High power consumption alone is insufficient to obtain a search warrant in the United States.

If you had read all the way to the third sentence, you would have seen:

Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation.

Ohio is part of the US, and the DEA is a US Federal agency.

This is exactly what I said. The warrant based on power usage alone, thus searching a bitcoin miner's house, was in Canada. In the US, other evidence is required in addition to power usage to obtain a warrant. Note that the DEA isn't even obtaining power usage information, nevermind a search warrant, without prior evidence.

In the US they've served no-knock raids against homeowners who have broken no law and had less than that for a reason to invade. Oh, and in multiple cases, they killed the homeowners they invaded. It's better that way because the dead can't sue, and if all the live witnesses are cops, no one ever did anything wrong. And all that without any "evidence" to speak of.

A 7th grader was shot in the back while laying on the ground face-down on police orders. No drugs found (father of the boy charged anyway, probably to hurt his case for a wrongful death that everyone was expecting to follow).

Or is one not enough? Do you need the meta-sites that gather up hundreds (or thousands?) of innocents dead during drug raids? Because they are prominent on Google. That just happened to be the very first result for my particular search, but I saw many many others.

Canada has a bill of rights too, and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, both of which are focused on protecting personal property from unreasonable search and seizure.
But it looks like using "too much" power automatically means somebody is treated like a criminal and subject to being searched to prove otherwise.

It's enough in the US to get a subpoena for the records, and that is enough to start an investigation. And, the average bitcoin miner will live a life similar to a grower (lots of usage with no light output) which, added together, is more PC than on most search warrants.

If they just cut a connection before the meter and manage to hide it, there are no power worries whatsoever. Cheaper utility bills to boot as well.

It's harder to do than you might think. The utility owns and reserves the right to inspect any/all wiring before the meter, and they DO have meters upstream. If the upstream meter is reporting more consumption than normal compared to the sub-meter consumption, they know something is up - either they have a short or somebody is stealing electricity. Then they have various means of testing individual homes.to determine the culprit.

Look, I'm not going to argue on whether or not marijuana should or should not be legal. Let's just accept (for this argument) that it is, and continue on the presumption that stopping a crime is, in and of itself, a worthy goal.

Let's also assume that "exceptionally high electric usage" has a correlation (but not causation) with said illegal activity.

There is a huge fucking difference between "getting a search warrant" and "asking some questions". Get this straight. Not every cop is a power-obsessed Nazi